The World Cup is a sports event without equal, because so many nations around the world engage in this four-year competition. In the playoffs, millions of people are focused together in the same direction. The world a white ball on a green field.
Last year, a little girl of Sacred Heart, Gianna Grossman, eight years old, who received First Communion in 2005, was playing a game of soccer. It is a great game because the tall and the small can play. People may have their heads in the air at various levels, but everybody’s humble feet are at the same distance from the planet. Thus soccer has become a game for all the world. In Gianna’s game, she scored a goal, which made her and her team and her mother very happy. On her way home, Gianna began humming with delight in the back of the car. Humming Panis Angelicus, the hymn that the theological genius, Thomas Aquinas, composed at the specific request of Pope Urban IV when the Pope first established the feast of Corpus Christi in 1264. She listens to it every Sunday here in Sacred Heart as people get ready to receive Communion … Panis Angelicus, the Bread of Angels. She and everyone present hears the words of Jesus from the Last Supper: “This is My Body … This is My Blood.” As they stand up to receive before the Eucharistic Minister, each one hears the proclamation: “The Body of Christ.” To this each receiving person declares: “Amen.” A single word that is beyond all words in terms of faith.
When Jesus said, “This is My Body,” He had bread in His hands, flat as pancake. Matter. Simple matter. A little piece of the planet. If the earth was an apple as big as Everest, the piece of bread is a child’s mouthful of it. But Jesus had the whole world in His hands. When He lifted the cup, it had His Blood and all the blood and sweat of genuine generosity ever given for love of others. It was a World Cup.
In countless places across the Earth, Catholic congregations walked in procession on Sunday, June 18th 2006 in public streets and a priest or bishop bore a holy Monstrance – a vessel made like a sunrise in the center of which is the Body of Christ, the Corpus Christi.
It is not so much to bring Christ to the planet because that has happened in the Incarnation. It is to celebrate that God is in all the Earth. It is to celebrate that God is in what is and we should live with that realization. Matter then is holy. We must walk reverently on it as the Buddhists do so well. Matter matters. We must use it carefully, reverently, and never wastefully or abominably like making a weapon out of it. It is the Corpus Christi.
On Sunday June 18th, the people of Sacred Heart walked in procession (a short distance to a public park) and there we raised the sacred Monstrance and blessed the earth to the north, to the west, to the south, and to the east. We also acknowledged where we are now, and how we will be going on a journey through death into an eternal morning.
Thus, we bless the universe and all the people in it, urging it all to be what it is, what it was meant to be, the Corpus Christi.